[mythtv-users] specific firewire question

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Sat Jun 17 22:36:29 UTC 2006


I hadn't had enough frustration at work this week, so I decided to spend
a lovely Saturday afternoon indoors trying to get my firewire connection
to work )-: Needless to say, zero success.

The question is about plugctl. The output from this program is
completely nonexistent. I can type garbage arguments to it and it just
silently exits. So how do I know if my command really worked?

In particular, I was going off the Firewire wiki page. This page says,
use broadcast mode only if nothing else works. Since nothing else has
worked, I tried it. If I enter the command:

# plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].channel=63
# plugreport

I can then see that the channel has indeed been set to 63 (it was 0
before). If I then try

# plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].bcast_connection=1
# plugreport

the output shows that bcast_connection is still set to 0. I presume this
means I'm not really in broadcast mode? Is there any way to determine if
the second plugctl command really worked or not, or why it failed?

If I try

# plugctl -n 1 oPCR[0].n_p2p_connections=1
# plugreport

this appears to work (but I still get nothing on the firewire).

For the record, I have shut down and powered off the cable box and the
computer, then removed power to them, at least a couple of dozen times
today, and always right before each test. I have tried each test with
the firewire cable connected before power on, with it connected after
power on but before any services start (while the kernel is loaded), and
after the system is fully booted. No difference in the results, I still
get zip. I have tried using plugctl once for each reboot to set
point-to-point mode, and to set broadcast mode (but I suspect, as above,
that the latter isn't really working). I have tried using test-mpeg2
first, and also trying to watch TV with Myth first. All tests failed
(get empty files or "no input in 15 seconds" in the backend log).

I am certain that I am not trying to tune an encrypted channel. I have
tried each test with at least two different channels. I have made sure
that Myth was configured with the correct node and mode for the given
test (point-to-point or broadcast).

What makes this particularly frustrating is that it has briefly worked a
couple of times in the past, enough for me to capture some HD recordings
that play back quite well, and enough to know that my cable is good and
it's not a hardware problem.

--Greg




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